Second John 1:5-6 Love and Obedience, walk according to Love and Truth

So we're on the second week of the second letter to John, or from John, to the chosen lady, or the elect lady, or as Ironside calls her, just the lady. So pick one of those and we'll go with it. But we're on verses five and six today. Bob covered one through three last week. In our schedule, in our syllabus, it was titled Love and Obedience, but I like the kind of title better for these verses five and six is Walk, or Walking According to Love and Truth, because that's kind of the main crux of what these verses are all about. So here I'll read from verse four from last week.

John says, I was very glad to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we have received commandment to do from the Father. And Roy pointed out last week, I think after the class, that And you might want to chime in here, Roy, but that I was very glad to find the word for find is eureka. Yeah. Eureka. Isn't that something? Yeah, that's the same word as E-U-R, Eureka. Right. Discovery of gold in 1849, California.

It was a eureka moment that some of her children were walking in the truth. And that phrase there in verse four is very important, walking in the truth, because we continue on that today. John is on this mini theme here. I was very glad to find some of your children walking the truth just as we received commandment to do from the Father.

And those are very familiar words from John. So verse five, now I ask you, lady, not as though I were writing to you a new commandment, but the one which we have had from the beginning, that we love one another. Verse six, and this is love that we walk according to his commandments. This is the commandment, just as you have heard from the beginning, that you should walk in it. So John, of course, repeats himself a lot for emphasis.

So this is very important stuff, walking and commandments, and the fact that they've had this commandment since the beginning. So I'm gonna continue an overview of this little letter, continuing on from what Bob covered last week, and there'll be a little overlap. First, I've really, in the past couple of weeks, thought about it and looked at it, and I think it's written to an actual person, an actual lady. One, it's addressed that way, and two, she has children, and three, she has a sister in the last verse, and I think her sister, we'll get to that, but I think her sister has children too, right?

So why not a church? Why isn't this, this chosen lady, a church, or a body of believers. Well, first of all, that word lady isn't used by anyone else, like Paul or Peter or anything. And the church is a body, and it's a bride, bride of Christ. It's used one time in the Gospel of John as the bride of Christ. I looked at it, and the bride of Christ is, as the church, is used five times in Revelation. but not a lady. And you and I are children of God, and if we called Holly Hills a lady, we're not children of Holly Hills Bible Church, for example.

And I don't know if that logic is good, but that's some of the thoughts I came up with. So I had this theory, and here's a theory, only a theory. The elect lady wrote to John first. She probably knew him from one of the churches he was shepherding or was ministering to in and around Ephesus. And she wrote him a question that greatly concerned her. And then I found that Ironside says much the same thing as well as Gabylene. in their commentaries. And it's very clear when you read it, he's He's saying hello to the lady, and he's really addressing a question she has. Now, Ironside proposes that, and this is interesting, this I didn't know, but I found this interesting.

He says that the lady's main question is in verse 10, and she had a problem with what to do about a man she suspects is a false teacher. And, you know, he's asking for hospitality and maybe support and things like that. Should she receive him in that way as a Christian brother? Or what is she to do?

And I think that that's a good see only a theory, but that's a good theory. And it's This theory, Ironside's theory, is a good use of this concept of Occam's razor. So saying that the simplest explanation is the best explanation for why John wrote the second epistle of John. So the mood and occasion to John seems to be in response to the lady's question.

And here's us, right after the 10 a.m. service, I think it was last week, yeah, Roger, you were ending 2 Corinthians, you wrapped it up, and you said that, you know, in the Old Testament, and with the first and second kings, and Joshua judges, then the major and minor prophets, such as Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, God seems to prefer to reveal his doctrines and glories in those books through prophets and through books of historians. And like first and second Kings are books of history of the nation of Israel. But in the New Testament, you said, God seems to prefer revealing himself in these letters, and from Paul and Peter, and oftentimes to individual people, if I have that right, Roger, right? Yeah, and it seemed like that it's interesting that it's just different. I mean, why didn't the Lord just lay it out one, two, three, four? Why do you have to go through a letter between people?

Yeah, right. And Roger, is your microphone on? I think it is. Can you hear me okay now? Or not? Yeah, that's better. Okay. Yeah, so yeah. I think others have mentioned that too. It's just, you know, we learned so much from the dialogue or the correction that Paul made to all the letters he wrote to the churches. We learned a tremendous amount, but it was in a letter format, which is interesting.

Yeah, yeah, and I mentioned here in 3A here that they're personal letters. One was a letter to Gaius that's That's actually third John, isn't it? I made a mistake there. I'll have to correct that before I send it to you all. The letter to Philemon is a personal letter. The letters to Timothy are personal letters. So if... The third letter of John to Gaius, I think is how you pronounce his name. If that's a person, then again, simplistically, it says it's a good assumption that this letter to the chosen lady is an actual lady. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So second John is the only letter addressed to a woman, which is a little obvious point. And then Let me move this down. Second and third John are, in essence, Ironside says, addendums to the first John. As you read them, they're very similar. So when I was going through this, I made my own outline. And we'll see if this outline holds.

So one is, he opens up with salutations and greetings, verses one through three. And he expresses gladness about her children walking in the truth. And then today we'll cover the personal plea to this woman to walk in the commandment to love one another, verses five and six. Then he goes in, after Thanksgiving, Bob will cover, he goes into warnings about antichrists or deniers or false teachers, verses seven through 11. He gives her an invitation exhortation to abide in the truth and teachings of Christ, in verse 9, and then an exhortation to get away from or eschew this false teacher from her company, in verses 10 and 11. And then he closes up the short letter with closing and a postscript. He hopes to meet her face to face again. In fact, he keeps the letter short so that he can just talk to her in person. And then he says, no, PS, your nieces and nephews greet you. The children of her sister is what that says in verse 13. So here's Ironside. I was using Ironside a lot. Here's his. It's just point one here, Roman numeral one, letter to a lady, he calls it, 2 John 1-13.

He divides it into a greeting, a command, a warning, and a conclusion. So I patted myself on the back because mine mirrored his very closely, and I didn't even look at it. But it was an easy one. I mean, a very short letter, it's easy to outline. Oh, I'm sorry? Yours is more explanatory, too. Oh, yeah, that's true. Well, mine kind of covers the whole letter.

I'll kind of bullet it out. It's kind of easy to do. So we're done. We can go home. So 3rd John, he outlines his He addresses Gaius, and then he addresses this man Diatrephes, and then Demetrius, and then he concludes. So that's two outlines from H.A. Ironside there. Okay, verse five.

You have a question? I have a question. Well, I have a statement, basically. I've noticed that both Hodges and my Home and Christian Study Bible both say the elect lady are churches. They do? Yeah. I think your explanation that it is basically to a lady, to a real person, is more convincing. Yeah, and some of the commentators said, you know, it requires less... sort of twisting or manipulating. Hijinks. Yeah.

But if it is to a church, that makes sense too, you know. It's just simpler to believe it is actually to a lady, you know, and especially because it talks about her cousins and her other relatives at the end of the book. Right, right, yeah. And how do you What do you do with the cousins and the relatives at the end of the book if it's too atrocious? Right.

And I think the language is the children of your chosen of your sister greet you. I think he uses the word children like in how he starts out here. So yeah, it could go either way. We will have some more about that maybe. It is more simple sense if it's to an actual person. Yeah, right. I agree with you, Jim.

So he starts out saying, now I ask you, lady, and let me wake up my computer. So the word ask is not, I thought it was a teo, I was going on that, you know, I looked it up and ask is a teo, A-I-T-E-O, a word used in scripture for asking God for, in prayer for things, making a request of God as, you know, as in first john 3 22s and whatever we ask we receive from him because we keep his commandments to do the things that are pleasing and do the things that are pleasing in the sight or james 1 5s if anyone lacks wisdom let him ask of god and god will give him wisdom he he does so liberally and without uh what's the word he uses, without reservation, or if someone has that up really quick, it's a short verse, and I just can't quote it by memory, but that's the word for asking God for something. So as I said, it's not that word, it's ero ta'o. So now I ero ta'o you lady, not as though I were writing to you a new commandment. It's still ask and it's still used in prayer, but there's a big caveat. And an example of ero ta'o is where Christ says, I will ask the father and he will give you another helper in John 14, 16. And that's ask is a present, tense, active voice, indicative, assertion of fact. So anyone know why the difference in Greek words for ask or extra credit?

Well, this lesson was very familiar, because I've covered just about the exact same things back in 1 John. And the reason is that Ea Tao is One which the asker, the suppliant, the one making a petition, is of a lesser position than the grantor of the request. Whereas erotaho is used when the petitioner is on equal footing with an equality with the grantor of the request. So you see how the difference in words matters because they're on the same footing, the two of them. And Roy often points out, and I like this comment he often says, is how exact and precise scripture is.

In the Greek, you know, there's these two words for ask, and it's important which one is used here. So John and the chosen leader are both children. Their position in Christ is equal. They're both walking in the truth. They're a brother and sister communicating. So that's eratao instead of ateo. I have a question. Yeah. I'm another gem. Oh, hi, Jim.

So the conclusion of this book is, and this is really illuminating what you said, that this woman, she's asking this question in response to a false teacher that she knows. So that seems to be the kind of the main theme that, you know, it says, you know, don't have anything to do with this guy.

And I guess what I'm wondering is, in the practical world, churches aren't always just composed of Christians. And when you have a false teacher, how do you deal with that? I know this is kind of off, but there are a lot of false teachers out there. And how do you deal with that? going too far off down a rabbit hole, but that's my question. No, that's a good question, because that was sort of circling in my mind, too, studying this.

Yeah, what do you do, and how do you determine that? And I think the answer is, when we get to it, and we will, it seems to think, and I'm reading ahead here, and I don't want to flesh it out here, but it seems to say, John seems to say, cut off, walk away, kind of shake the dust off your shoes and don't associate. But we'll get to that, I think. I think we'll have a bigger discussion there, I'm sure, about what to do in that situation. But that's a good observation. So here, we're still in verse five, and I'm paraphrasing this next little section.

He says, I'm not writing you a new commandment, but a commandment we've had from the beginning. And I've just cut out a little of the prepositions there and things. So he's not writing a new commandment, but one that we've had since the beginning. So, I noticed that it's a statement of contrast. The contrast is, it's not a new thing, but it's an old thing or something from the beginning.

And he stated this exact same thing in the first epistle, right? And here it is in 1 John 2, 7, he says, beloved, I'm not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment, which you've had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which you have heard.

So he's repeating them. And I actually covered that verse, I think, back in 1 John. So I was like, oh, this is an easy lesson. I had easy work of it. But then I had new questions. It took me a while. And here's two other examples. He says, on the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining.

That's from the next verse, 1 John 2.8.

And then in 1 John 3, 23, he says, this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his son, Jesus Christ, that we love and love one another, just as he commanded us. So he just, he says one thing about six different ways, doesn't he? So it's really clear what he's saying. And this is the source of what John said in 1st John and this 2nd John, this verse, is from Christ himself. In John 13, 34, Christ says, A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you love one another. And then in 1512, John 1512, this is my commandment, that you love one another just as I loved you.

So I'm just laughing because it's saying the same thing, right? And it's very clear, but it's so important. And I think that's why it's repeated and he repeats it to this woman. It's very important that John, he feels to get that across to everyone he writes to.

So the word new is kainos. So the commandment is not novel or a new thing. It's not unprecedented. or given for the first time, it is a commandment they've had since the beginning. Now we have to look at what the beginning is, and that's arke in the Greek.

And I just reviewed what we did in 1 John, and we came to the conclusion that the beginning, the commandment we've had since the beginning, is not in eternity past, as John 1.1 is.

It's not at the creation of the heavens and earth, the beginning of the heavens and earth, like Genesis 1.1. But it's since the beginning of their learning of the truth of the gospel of Christ. Now just to, there's another, there's another interpretation of beginning, and not Macaulay, but McGee, J. Vernon McGee, thinks that it's the beginning of when Christ arrived on the scene and started preaching gospel.

He calls that the beginning, which is a good, that's a good interpretation as well. But I think this This is the proof of verse that John says in this first epistle in 224. He says, let that abide in you which you have heard from the beginning. So that little qualification there, you've heard it from the beginning. So that means they have ears and they actually physically heard it, the gospel, and that's the beginning. And I think that's the best way to define beginning here.

So the command, of course, is to love one another. It's agapeo, agapao. And it's a present tense, active voice, subjunctive mode. So it's a potentiality mode. And then it's Love one another is alalan, which is a personal possessive pronoun. So agapao alalan. So I kind of rewrote it in English, and I think it's really accurate. Love your own brethren. Mutually and reciprocally is the idea in English. So I had a question that I asked myself and I try to answer here.

How do we know this command is directed at fellow believers, our brothers and sisters in Christ, and not humanity in general, right? You know, it's one thing to love everybody and things like that, but he says here, I think it's constrained to just our fellow believers.

And I think the answer in that lies that in his first epistle, in six verses, six times, He ties loving the brethren with love one another. So he uses them interchangeably a little in his first letter. He'll say love one another, sure. But he also says love the brethren. And he does it that, love the brethren. And I think the Greek word for brethren there is adelphos. He uses that six times.

So I think it's constrained to just fellow believers. And I think the crux of this letter is this lady is asking John in light, she knows of this command, love one another, but she's asking, as Jim said, what to do about the ones who deny the humanity or deity of Christ. Um, you know, This guy, this one man is a denier, which we'll see in the next few weeks. So he's peddling his Gnostic gospel, whatever he's peddling there, and he's asking for some hospitality or support. And this lady, and this is all theory, but it's a good theory, and she's asking, hey, in light of that, what do I do, right? And that's, oh, Well, and maybe we'll get to that answer here as we study this book more.

So John goes on to say, and this is love, that we walk according to His commandments. So just the concept is defined in the statement there, that love is walking, keeping His commandments. Christ, Jesus Christ says in John 14, 15 and 14, 21, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. He who has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my father and I will love him and will disclose myself to him. When I first came across verse six here, we're in verse six, and this is love, that we walk according to his commandments, is how it starts out.

I was like, boy, that's a tough statement. I don't know. Love is walking according to his commandments, and I was, It kind of perplexed me for a bit, but then I just found these words from Christ himself, and it answers it perfectly, exactly what John is meaning.

And he's just re-quoting what he heard Christ say when he was here on this earth. He does that, Eli. He just parrots, actually, what Christ said when he was here on the earth in his ministry. So Akapa'ola then is ordering our lives to be conformed to the truth or walking in the truth.

Verse 4 says walking in the truth. He's talking about the children of the elect lady and loving your brother. Walking, that's a cool word that we've heard. This is review for probably everybody. But walking is peripeteo, peripetao. It's in the present tense, ongoing action. And then I looked at, I think it was Strong's, says it means the treading of the feet, or literally the advancement that you gain by putting one foot in front of the other. You know, that's peripetao. And petao is of feet treading, and then the peri, the first part of the word, is concerning, or about, or around, concerning the treading of feet, this walking.

And that's our Christian, that's a command that Paul uses. There's so many examples of that that I didn't go over it because there's just too many. It's all over Paul's epistles. So walking according to his commandments, that according to his qa'ta, and that means down from. And it's really down from a standard. So the word qa'ta expects things produced after to follow the standard set by the first thing or the prototype, the standard.

Merriman would always talk about this, the craft of tool and die making. So you have machinery and you make this die, which is a cast die, which you use that and then you pour mold into it and it makes your whatever you're making your bolt. And it's perfect because it's cast to make the bolt exactly the right size and things like that.

So that's how he describes this kata. And I can't describe it because I don't know tools and things like that. I'm not an engineer. So if you look it up on the internet, you'll see what I mean. So walking according to a standard or a commandment. I looked back, and I said, how much is that used? Is this familiar to these? Is this a familiar command to people back then?

And it is, because in the Old Testament, and I'm kind of calling Mark and the Acts like the end of the Old Testament, when before, the Holy Spirit came. So the Pharisees and scribes would use that exact phrasing when they said, why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with unpure hands? So that's the same phrase, according to the tradition. Acts 21, 21, and they have been told about you, that you are teaching all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children, nor to walk according to the customs. So this walking according to the commandments, that's a very familiar phrase to these people. So he goes on to say in verse six, This is the commandment, just as you had heard from the beginning, that you should peripeteo in it, or walk in it.

And he's just here restating what he's stated several times in several ways in 5 and 6, and also in his first epistle. So nothing new here too much, but I think it's for emphasis, he repeats himself, as I've mentioned before, in a different way to this lady. She and her children receive the truth of Christ in their spiritual beginning, and they shouldn't leave it or pursue a course that's not on the narrow, defined path of the gospel that John brought. We'll see in verses 7 through 11 About when he talks about this Christ denier or these deniers He he takes a specific time to address a heresy So he's trying to get them to and this lady to Stay on the the faith the the body of truth that she's learned from the beginning And I'm restating this, I've stated this before, but it's possible, only possible that this lady is presently being pursued by some Christ denier and she just wants grounding. grounding truth from John himself once more. She just wants to hear it from his own words once more, I think.

This man could be a Docetist or a Cyrenthian. Those are two Gnostic camps. The Docetists believe that Christ only seemed to be human. He wasn't really human. And this Corinthianism is that the concept that Jesus was a man, so they got that right. He's a human. But the divine Christ descended on him and remained with him through his life until the cross. Then the divine Christ left right before he died. And that's still going on today. So he could be one of these two camps, we don't know.

And that's a subtext in the first epistle of John 2. But John in that epistle really keeps his focus on the light and glory of Christ instead of addressing that heresy. But he mentions it a little, and it's a subtext in 1 John. But here it's more front and center because he addresses it in the next two verses, and the letter is only 13 verses long.

So I like this quote that I've used before from H.A. Ironside, speaking of Christianity. He says, what is new is not true. And what is true is not new. And he says, you know, we aren't in a process of discovering Christ's words in Christian doctrine. It was a revelation committed to godly men by the Holy Spirit at the beginning of the church age. And it came down and it was set and it remains that way. So I like that.

What is true is not new. And what is new is not true. And what is true, well, let me read that again. Yeah, it's a tongue twister. What is new is not true. And what is true is not new. And it's an axiom, and it's a good one. So the new things, you get nothing from hearing new things, new gospels or anything like that.

The ones we have are the ones that are set in stone. So to some, he's saying to this lady, walk in what you've heard from the beginning of old. And Paul says it the same way. Therefore, just as you've received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, Colossians 2.6. So Paul and John are saying the same thing there. So those are those two verses.

And I just want a little addendum here. I did a word cloud of this letter. And for emphasis, the main thing he's emphasizing in this letter is truth, the word truth. And commandment, of course, is very front and center, too. And it just helped me with kind of getting the stress or the emphasis of the letter.

First John, just by way of mention, the First John word cloud. The words to the left there are ones that are prominent in 1 John. So he, brother, the word brother occurs a lot, commandment, world, of course, son, sin, he addresses sin. He talks a lot about the Holy Spirit, the beginning, and then of course eternal life. So that's how the two kind of overlap with commandment, but he brings in this, not a new word, but a new concept he uses is truth. And father, of course, occurs in both of the letters. So I just thought that was kind of cool. I don't know how useful those are, but they're They look nice, don't they?

Yeah. This might be a silly question, but how did you do that word cloud? Oh, yeah, that's a good question. There's some free things on the internet that you just word cloud things that you just put in the text, and then it gives you a word cloud. So it wasn't much work at all. It's been too much time. I'll have to try it out. Yeah. You just have to cut and paste your text a lot, right? So Romans, that would be a hard word. Oh, Andrew, we can't wait. That would be tough. But I've seen them used before. I just don't know how accurate they are. Do they give you a count, like how many times truth Yeah, they give you the cow. Okay, and then how many times like brother and truth were you I mean, so we have an idea like truth is well, I probably could count it but Right in this letter.

It's not much at all because there's probably all the words are probably right there in this letter, right? But the one for first John, I don't think I copied that in there. No It's okay, it's not much more words, but I think people are using it just to the themes will jump out at you, you know? Looking for added text for the very first time. And then some word clouds divide them into categories, which is kind of cool too. So yeah, so I don't know, maybe it's worth it, maybe it's not, but I started off doing that.

So yeah, I'll close in prayer here. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for John and his words to this chosen lady that we're studying and his encouraging words to her. And we pray that we learn, you give us wisdom as to the crux of the matter, what to do about this. false teachers we encounter and how to handle that in wisdom and truth and the way that you would be glorified with. We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.